


your bones/my hands/eternity

by youremyqueen



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Reality, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Depressing, Drabble, M/M, Mild Gore, POV Male Character, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 08:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2060613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A thousand happier endings that Beyond Birthday never had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your bones/my hands/eternity

**Author's Note:**

> utterly depressing tumblr drabble with no redeeming qualities. beyond birthday is a despicable person but writing this gutted me and now i just wish he was allowed to be happy. fuck death note. god, this is a cheery author's note isn't it? thanks for reading!

There are versions of the story where Beyond Birthday never comes to Wammy’s house, where he dies at age four from starvation, where he raises himself on the streets and becomes a flush Tokyo heroin dealer, where he’s scouted in his mid-teens by a smiling man in a polyester suit and does middle-wage porn acting until he accidentally offs himself through auto-erotic asphyxiation in his trailer after a shoot. There are a few versions where he’s marginally happy, where the ghost tittering in his ear is mostly drowned out by the low buzz of television static, laughter in the next room, simple grim day-to-day pleasures that get him by.

There are versions where he goes to Wammy’s and L doesn’t, and he leaves shortly afterward, or drowns himself in the well, or becomes the world’s greatest three detectives and fucks it up mercilessly and burns up before Kira even makes it to second year of high school. There’s a version where A doesn’t kill himself, and instead he and B steal a beaten up ‘92 Chevy pick-up that someone had sparingly coated in gold paint and erringly left in a Winchester parking lot overnight and drive to London and take up shit waitstaff jobs in a diner and are always late on rent and kiss each other clean after long shifts and waste their intellect with a rampant satisfaction that neither of them have ever before known.

There’s a version of that story where L doesn’t care at all, and another where he tracks them down, comes in the flesh because they dodge all the operatives he sends, and drags them home kicking and laughing like they’re a couple of misplaced toys that he’s not done playing with. In that version B blows him on the car ride home and A won’t speak to him for a week. They’re delinquents, they’ve got their hearts and hands everywhere. A still hangs eventually in almost every version, but later.

There’s a version where L kisses him and doesn’t stop, calls him dark quiet things and B becomes like the snowstorm, raging over him, locking him in and becoming the skeleton key. They climb each other with fingertips scaling ladders of vertebrae, up and up and up and but never reaching the top. The end is a myth, like spring is to the winter. B kisses L’s eyelids, wax-paper thin, bruised tired, loosing sleep like there’s a leak in his head from which it pours. They are never unafraid. A hangs like a flag at half-mast, and they the mourners in their bare white bones instead of their funeral blacks.

There’s a version where nobody dies, where everyone wins. A Wednesday afternoon in Tokyo brings a torrential rainstorm and the Kira case folds quickly in their hands, two against one too easy, almost, a game of their own in which everyone, even god, is just a piece. In that version L lives to retire and he and B fade likes banished ghosts into an apartment in Vienna and become boring, quiet, grinning people with a cat and a favorite pub and bills to pay and grey hairs and more than one set of trousers each, and only come in on big, grand, roaring, important cases. Nothing ever really measures up to Kira case, but there’s a certain level of contentment where, once reached, one stops measuring.

None of these versions actually happen in the world that Beyond is stuck in, cuffed to a gurney in a Los Angeles hospital with an FBI agent following at either side, reading him his rights.

Naomi Misora is a dear, brittle thing and he would like to write her into one of his universes, except they don’t know if he’ll regain motor functions. The only certainty is of scarring. He can feel it, a brand of loss. Can’t even die, and he thinks maybe this reality is cheating him, keeping him from escaping into the great writhing mass of them and picking a favorite. One with white fingers and lips and a pulse to chart a course by.

L comes to visit him in the hospital only once, and even then he maybe dreams it. He touches B’s scars with his bare hands and that’s dangerous, might get him infected - please infect me, please I have hollows for the poison to fill - but he doesn’t wince.

"I had a dream during surgery," B says to him, because L won’t speak, "that I was a saint. Everything happened the same, but underneath it I had a sacred purpose, and in the end there was a point to it. I burned like Joan of Arc and you cried for me." He smiles even though half of his facial muscles are paralyzed, hopes it’s a horror to behold. "What a load of shit, right?"

L’s jaw is locked so tight and he leaves then, too fast, practically running and hiding, and B hopes that the nothing he feels keeps him warm at night.

He dies in prison, finally, finally after so much waiting, and swims out into the deep drowning ocean of his alternate worlds, prayers and incarnates, and finds a cool blue night with frail white arms to lie down in.


End file.
